[standup75]

A night of December 2013, I was walking towards the waterfront from our apartment on S1th and Berry in Brooklyn.I saw the spectacle of this ultra lit cityscape. What we're capable of doing with nature was somehow telling me that we have to do it. At the time it was a simple intuition. Now I can better piece things together, as if the cause of this intuition unwinds in front of me, with a fake air of truth. And I thought about the big things that mankind achieved. I thought going in space was one of them. But why? It's just what our species do. Space is just the new unknown territory. The trees grew higher to reach more sun and survive. We conquered all territories of this planet, that's how we survived. Also, we never had to look at leaving the place clean behind us, this has never been a survival instinct. But now, that we just settled, we grow out of place/resource, we start messing things up dangerously here. There is no telling how this will end, but now more than ever, we know that things must change. The way of caring about Nature that this situation requires is something we never experienced. One of the problems is that there is no direct payback for good behavior. Now that we're outside of the food chain in our leaky man-made biosphere we call cities, we are too far from the consequences of our actions on nature. Really this sucks. There is no turning back. The march of the civilization on our landscapes is devastating. Recycling plastic bags is not gonna cut it. We're just too many, each of us taking too much space, and growing. We need to be better at knowing nature as much as we need to have an escape. Let me insist on "as much as", otherwise this would just be another escapist rational and doesn't have anything to do with the highest good. So how could colonizing the galaxy be the highest good? Well, the highest good is not an expression I'm personally very fond of. This suggests the universality of virtues, which I am still struggling with. But let's assume that the highest good is to follow what we're programmed for, what we're good at, what we can call, inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, our will as a species. Searching to understand nature and exploring new territories is a game we like to play. The excitement of discovery is so deeply ingrained in our species. This really is our life instinct. Whereas keeping things static, finding comfort in not questioning or enforcing our representations of the world is our death instinct.